Beyond the doors of Palazzo Morando in Milan, in the heart of the Fashion Quadrilateral, lies one of the city’s most fascinating museums and, behind it, the story of an exceptional woman: Countess Lydia Caprara di Montalba, wife of Count Gian Giacomo Morando de’ Rizzoni Attendolo Bolognini. The vicissitudes of Palazzo Morando, now home to the Costume Moda Immagine museum of the City of Milan, thus link up with some stories that are still partly to be told: the stories of the women who, in different ways and with different roles, were protagonists in the birth or evolution of the city’s most important museum institutions during the 20th century and whom we find today in Milan’s museums. Stories of refined collecting taste and love for art, but also of courageous commitment to the protection of cultural heritage and society.
The elegant home of Lydia Caprara, on Via Sant’Andrea, can only be the starting point of our feminine journey among Milan’s museums. Besides the countess of Palazzo Morando, other women marked Milanese museum history, such as Fernanda Wittgens, heroine of the Pinacoteca di Brera, or Marieda Di Stefano, whose memory lives on in the Boschi Di Stefano House-Museum..
Stories of women in Milan’s museums: Palazzo Morando in Milan, the elegant home of Lydia Caprara di Montalba
The halls of Palazzo Morando still reverberate with the memory of Countess Lydia Caprara di Montalba, among the splendid 18th-century furnishings of the original aristocratic apartment and the pieces of the extremely rich civic collection composed of Milanese views, clothes, costumes and haute couture accessories, from the 17th century to the present day: this is the Costume Moda Immagine collection owned by the City of Milan, which finds its ideal home right in the heart of the Quadrilatero della Moda, a prime location for exhibitions dedicated to Milanese costume and history.
The palace on Via Sant’Andrea was donated by the countess to the Milanese municipality in 1945, at the time of her own death. Many years earlier, Lydia Caprara had purchased the elegant mansion of 16th-century origin together with her husband, Count Gian Giacomo, whom she married at a very young age. The two had settled there since 1903, amassing an eccentric collection of Egyptian artifacts, porcelain, cabinet work, and works of art, and organizing social evenings of original refinement at the palace. Lydia, who was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, in a very wealthy family of bankers of Venetian origin, loved art and esotericism: fond of drawing and photography, she practiced spiritualism and certainly did not renounce the comforts of her social position. A very elegant woman – as told by her famous portrait painted by painter Vittorio Corcos, which depicts her dressed according to the fashion of the 1920s: dark, long dress, tight at the waist, and a long necklace of white pearls.
Attentive to fashion as well as to the needs of the less fortunate, she was a tireless benefactor. In addition to the works accomplished in the Lodi and Brescia areas-where the Morando Attendolo Bolognini couple owned the castle of Sant’Angelo Lodigiano and the palace of Lograto-her commitment to Milan was no less important to her. Alongside her generous contributions to the Ospedale Maggiore, the donation of Palazzo Morando on Via Sant’Andrea was destined to leave an indelible mark on the city’s cultural life. In 1945, at the suggestion of her friend Giorgio Nicodemi, superintendent of the Milanese Civic Museums since 1928, the enlightened will of the countess was the establishment of a new museum for the Lombard capital. So it happened, and the palace, in 1958, was opened to the public as the Milan Museum.
Stories of women in Milan’s museums: Fernanda Wittgens, the fighter of Milan’s museums
Around the same years that saw Lydia Caprara play a leading role in the life of Palazzo Morando and its transformation into a museum, the story of Fernanda Wittgens also unfolded. First woman director of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Fernanda is remembered for her totalitarian and tenacious commitment to the protection of Milan‘s cultural heritage, especially during the difficult years of World War II and post-war reconstruction: a commitment never distinct from a fierce ethical tension, aimed at fighting social injustices and the liberticidal abuses of the fascist regime. The Pinacoteca di Brera, the Cenacolo Vinciano, the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, and the Castello Sforzesco owe to the work of the Milanese civil servant the partial salvage of wartime destruction and the surge of rebirth that followed the end of World War II. Of middle-class extraction, a brilliant student, Fernanda had landed at the Pinacoteca di Brera in 1928 in the modest role of casual worker, soon to become assistant to the then director Ettore Modigliani, who was Jewish and shortly thereafter a victim of racial persecution: the rest is history.
Neither the bombings nor the imprisonment served because of the help given to the expatriation of Jews and political persecuted people were enough to dampen the courage of the “little lark.” “…Dear Mom, I always told you that I gave as much to the family as I could, but never would I sacrifice my thoughts and ideals to it. One cannot and would not be right to betray oneself even for the dearest affections,” he would write in 1944, from a cell in San Vittore prison.
Fernanda resisted the war to live, with an even more combative spirit, the season of rebirth: with her came the reconstruction of the new Brera, entrusted to the architect Piero Portaluppi and inspired by an innovative conception of the picture gallery as a space of aggregation and social participation; with her began the reconstruction of the Scala Theater Museum and of the Poldi Pezzoli Museum, as well as the fundamental postwar restoration of the Last Supper; with her, the City of Milan succeeded in acquiring Michelangelo’sPietà Rondanini, now an illustrious masterpiece of the Civic Museums housed at the Castello Sforzesco.
Stories of women in Milan’s museums: Marieda at Casa Boschi Di Stefano, a museum for love
A final, sweet story brings us to meet another female figure counted among the women of Milan’s museums: the protagonist is Marieda Di Stefano, a whimsical artist, ceramist and art collector, wife of engineer Antonio Boschi. The love between the two, which sparked during a vacation in Valsesia in 1926, blossomed into an overwhelming passion for art and a dedication to collecting together works by the most important artists of the time, frequenters of their Milanese home at 15 Jan Street. From Sironi to Lucio Fontana, from Carlo Carrà to Giorgio De Chirico, many were the giants of twentieth-century Italian art who passed through the rooms of Antonio and Marieda’s apartment, since 2003 the home of the Boschi Di Stefano House-Museum. “It is not a tribute paid to the memory of my companion but it corresponds to reality. Common work in the total sense: in the material sense with the implications of decisions, of application, of financial sacrifices and consequent renunciations in other fields; and in the artistic sense as concordance of tastes, of addresses, of choices,” said Antonio Boschi in 1974, at the act of donating to the City of Milan the collection built with his beloved, an example of talented female creativity.
